PSY-WAR/MASS-MEDIA/INFOTOXIN QUOTES
see the excellent film Wag the
Dog, with Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman! Soundtrack
by Mark Knopfler, too!
"War is show business...it's a pageant..."
"If you give a man the correct
information for seven years, he may believe the incorrect information on the
first day of the eighth year when it is necessary, from your point of view,
that he should do so. Your first job is to build credibility and the
authenticity of your propaganda, and persuade the enemy to trust you although
you are his enemy."
Psychological Warfare Casebook, Operations Research,
"Psychological warfare is at
best a cumbersome and pretentious label for an important modern political and
military weapon, the use of mass-communication...and is one of the few
completely legitimate weapons which can on occasion be directed against an
entirely civilian and non-combatant target."
E. W. Barrett, Truth is Our
Weapon
"Why of course the people
don't want war...the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the
leaders...that is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger."
Hermann Goerring,
Third Reich
"The lie can be maintained
only for such time as the state can shield the people from political, economic
and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use
all of its powers to repress dissent, for the
truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes
the greatest enemy of the state."
Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels,
Third Reich
"The art of propaganda lies in
understanding the emotional basis of the great masses an finding, through a
psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart
of the broad masses. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited,
their intelligence small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In
consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very
few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public
understands what you want him to understand or believe..."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"Psychological
warfare was used originally if you were in an actual war situation...to
disorient, confuse, upset, and make more vulnerable the populations of the
adversary side...Now, in the same sense, some of the same principles can be
transferred and can be applied not against somebody who is on the other side in
a war but against groups that for whatever reason you wish to impart certain
kinds of outlooks to or to change their outlooks or...to get them
confused. So in a sense
we're all getting psychological warfare all the time...Our own domestic
population is regarded as a target for a whole vast range of these types of
stimuli..."
Herbert Schiller, media analyst,
UC- San Diego
"Non-rational
propaganda...is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interestg, but is dictated by, and appeals
to...passion...propaganda in favor of action dictated
by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled, or
incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims
by the mere repetition of catch words, by the furious denunciation of foreign
or domestic scape-goats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with
the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of
God...The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us...But so,
unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unreason and falsehood -
particularly in those cases where the falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion,
or where the appeal to unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive,
subhuman depths of our being...What happened is the development of a vast
mass-communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true or
the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant."
Aldous Huxley, Brave
"The deliberate creation of unreality is one of the most
pivotal social forces shaping our time...As the reality of the outside world
has become increasingly complex, especially in the years since World War 2, we have developed a fascination with unreality that is
virtually psychopathic. The purpose of this transfiguration of common sense - our
fascination with it - is to avoid coping with a complex world...Everything in
contemporary America is an entertainment, from sporting event to big business,
politics, certainly religion, and even academia…Unreality One refers to the
fact that we are now so close to creating electronic images of any existing or
imaginary person, place or thing that an electronic image and a real person can
interact at the same time on a computer screen or TV so that a viewer cannot
tell whether one or both of the images are real or not. Unreality Two is
akin to Pseudo-Reality. It is the deliberate denial and distortion of reality, i.e.,
complexity, through the massive infusion of entertainment into every aspect of
society which on its surface purports to deal with reality….In this rampant
context of no context, if not deliberately orchestrated confusion, the only
constant is the personalities of the TV news and anchors and reporters…When
ideas and events themselves no longer carry any badge or mark of instant
coherency and credibility, then the cohesion we need to make sense of our lives
has to be carried by some other elements in our society…what better supplier of
continuity could there be than the pleasant faces who make pablum
out of chaos and soothe our fragile egos by masquerading as our ‘friends.’?”
Warren Bennis
and Ian Mitroff, The
Unreality Industry
"And here at last...is what
the 'War on Terrorism' is all about. It is not about money. It is
not about oil. And it is not about
religion. It is about control. And the ultimate level of control,
the type of control that is necessary in order to completey
manufacture te reality that we all perceive - the
reality that is so far at odds with the objective reality of global corporate
rule, otherwise known as global fascism - is control of the human mind."
David McGowan, author, Derailing
Democracy
"The scientist of today...is
distressed by the fact that the results of his scientific work have created a
threat to mankind since they have fallen into the hands of morally blind
exponents of political power. He is conscious of the fact technological methods,
made possible by his work, have led to a concentration of economic and also of
political power in the hands of small minorities, which have come to dominate
completely the lives of the masses of people, who appear more and more
amorphous. But even worse: the concentration of economic and
political power has not only made the man of science dependent economically, it
also threatens his independence from within:
the shrewd methods of intellectual and psychic influences which it brings to
bear will prevent the development of independent personalities."
Albert Einstein, Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists, 1952
“Ad Alley’s wizards have
firmly established themselves as both the creators and the controllers of our
consumer culture…at the heart of Madison Avenue’s new, elaborately engineered
system of persuasion lies one fundamental premise: each group in our society has its weaknesses
and deep-seated emotional needs…One of the most widely used psychographic
approaches on Ad Alley today…is VALS (Values and
Life-Styles)…The world according to VALS is
simple: there are essentially five basic
groups of citizens in this nation – Belongers,
Emulators, Emulator-Achievers, Societally Conscious
Achievers, and the Need-Directed. Each segment of VALS-society
is driven by its own special demons, demons that the advertising industry seeks
to exorcise with its 30-second television commercials and print ads…”
Stuart Ewen,
Captains of Consciousness
“A propaganda model suggests that the ‘societal
purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and
political agenda of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic society
and state. The media serve this purpose
in many ways: through selection of
topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information,
emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bound of acceptable
premises.”
Noam Chomsky, Thought Control in a Democratic Society
“If in some Orwellian future there were One Big Owner, he might be benevolent, in his own opinion,
as indeed, Orwell’s Big Brother was – in his own opinion. Big Brother let the public
see and hear a variety of things he deemed useful – where there is centralized
control, it is the One Big Owner who makes the choices…Each year is more likely
that the American citizen who turns to any medium – newspapers, magazines,
radio, TV, books, movies, cable, recordings, video cassettes – will receive
information, ideas, or entertainment controlled by the same handful of
corporations, whether it is daily news, a cable entertainment program, or a
textbook…Media giants have become so powerful that government no longer has the
will to restrain them…Now that media owners are so large that they are part of
the highest levels of the world economy, the news and other public information
become heavily weighted in favor of all corporate
values. The new corporate ethic
is so single-minded about extreme fast profits and expanded control over the
media business that it is willing to convert American news into a service for
the affluent customers wanted by the media’s advertisers instead of a source of
information significant for the whole of society.”
Ben Bagdikian,
The Media Monopoly
“Consider the ramifications if the death of
nature is a carefully planned, well thought-out and deliberate act by the
faceless rulers of Earth. The forces of
global totalitarianism may actually believe they can replace all forms of life
with man-made simulations…totalitarianism seeks
literally for the control of the totality.
There are wholesale substitutes for nature, man-made
fabrications composed of false versions of life-forms and life-processes,
already being forcibly superimposed on natural reality. The darkest conceivable plan is at work
here. In order even to realize the full
magnitude of this evil, it is necessary as never before to fathom what nature
really means for the spiritual and material existence of the human race. Nature is free. The forces of totalitarianism have understood, that for this very reason, nature has to go. Until now, the dominant power structure has
been unable to do anything about this dangerous oversight. Because not only is nature itself free, it is
the source of all practical freedom for our species. Nature is the living body of the world, the
source of all human physical existence:
the fount of our health, well-being, material security, and individual
freedom…[the forces of global totalitarianism] have in
mind to completely remove humanity from God’s creation, and to force mankind
into total dependency on their replacements.
And then to control us absolutely through these
very substitutes for natural existence they plan to sell us.
Diane Harvey, “Global Totalitarianism and the Death of
Nature”
“The first rule for maintaining control over
other human beings is to powerfully discourage individual mental development
through impressing the notion of superior external authority…the power to
manipulate minds is becoming so sophisticated that only the most circumspect
are surviving as reasonably free thinkers.
As increasingly diabolical power consolidates in fewer and fewer hands,
access to alternative information becomes a determining factor in human
life…That Thing out there still referred to as a civilization – the
Corporate/Military/Government Mind – has been methodically laying waste to
reality in every respect. And its main
technique is through incessantly feeding the public an entire world-view made
out of toxic substitutes for information and truth.”
Diane Harvey, “The Peoples’s
“A
world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of
democratic government.”
Kenneth Boulding ,
University of Michigan , quoted in The Hidden Persuaders
“Behind the
ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no
allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this
invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business
and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.”
President Theodore
Roosevelt, 1906
“I see in the
near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for
the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been
enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money
power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the
Republic is destroyed.”
Abraham Lincoln , 1865
“I came to
Albert
Einstein, 1947
“The
liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private
power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself.
That in its essence is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a
group or any controlling private power.”
President Franklin
D. Roosevelt
on the
threat to democracy by corporate power:
“... the
“The World Bank,
IMF, and private banks have consistently lavished huge sums on terror regimes,
following their displacement of democratic governments, and a number of
quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive relationship between U.S.
and IMF/World Bank aid to countries and their violations of human rights.”
Edward S. Herman , economist, U.S. media and foreign
policy critic author of The Real Terror Network
“To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than
ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they
blind people to real dangers and real possibilities."
Erick Fromm, The
Art Of Being
"…the more frequently and fluently a medium is used, the more
'transparent' or 'invisible' to its users it tends to become. For most routine
purposes, awareness of a medium may hamper its effectiveness as a means to an
end. Indeed, it is typically when the medium acquires transparency that its
potential to fulfil its primary function is greatest."
Marshal McLuhan
"A key role of the mass media is to prevent the public
from achieving a
big picture understanding of how people and planet are systematically
subordinated to short-term profit."
media lens
"The corporate grip on opinion in
the
Gore
Vidal
"Following
the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two
decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has
consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths.
The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to
the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has
become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state."
David
McGowan
"What Innis saw most clearly was
that the main meaning of electronics was not in the provision of entertainment
and information through radio and television. He recognized that the speed and
distance of electronic communication enlarged the possible scale of social
organization and greatly enhanced the possibilities of centralization and
imperialism in matters of culture and politics." (p.
137)
(Carey)
"The technotronic
era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a
society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained
by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and
maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal
information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieve/review
by the authorities."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, CFR member and founding member of the Trilateral
Commission, and National Security Advisor to five
presidents.
http://fox.rollins.edu/~jsiry/VOCAB.html
Vocabulary to learn and use.
B,
C, D, E, F, H, I, M, O, P, R, S, Sy,
T, Tr
An
advanced level of terms to describe the prevailing views, behavior and conditions in society today with respect to
how we treat one another due to the unseen and pervasive influence of technology in our lives.
Brainwash, to have one's beliefs and views altered by undue
persuasive force. Noam
Chomsky says manufacturing consent is old
style propaganda in a guise of objectivity,
reductionism, certainty, & fragmentation. Some call this overt & covert aspects of thought
control. Chomsky feels that we are isolated -- atomized
victims of modern imagery,
language, & media see the Manufacture of Consent.
commodification ,
commercialization, or the selling of things; The notion that
any item, person, or place can be interchangeably valued,
exchanged, or purchased for
some price. These beliefs are enhanced due to mass production which has fed the growth
of advertising, marketing, and public relations.
conspicuous consumption is
the ostentatious display of wealth in order to gain
recognition, increase one's status, intimidate others, or dispel
reality.
culture, from the Latin word cultus, to cultivate (raise
crops) or to form a cult, refers to
the inherited ethnic identity of all peoples derived from
language, nutrition, surroundings,
religious beliefs, social institutions, and material artifacts. As such any culture
disturbs,
reinforces and often fabricates new views about nature, the
world and the universe,
because ideas embodied in all cultures shape the way we
choose to live.
delusional intelligence,
refers to some distortion inherent in technology is enhanced by
our ignorance of aesthetic judgment, moral certitude, and
decency -- but it is further and
needlessly mystified if we do not understand the rationale,
synergy, timing, or varied
aspects of technology.
ecology, is derived from the GREEK word for household: oikos -- residence of the
family : oikumene -- structures
& buildings, oikios topos -- the nest or place
that best suits
a specific plant. Logos is the study of a body of ideas
-- as expressed in particular words
and phrases that comprise the language & viewpoint of
ecolacy.
editing can be an
example of a manufactured view point by leaving out significant details
and including tangential details that crowd out the focus
of an issue, event, or problem.
fabricating consensus
is based on our widespread ignorance of media uses, the
influence of technology in shaping our reality, and the
illusion that every new product is a
signal of progress.
fictions are
accepted explanations for otherwise complicated events or even unreal
circumstances. Fictions refer to unexamined descriptions or
meaningless metaphors;
for example: "national security,"
"friendly fire," "necessity is the mother of invention,"
"perpetual
motion," "the common good. "
"human
ecology cannot be limited strictly to biological concepts, but it cannot
ignore
them. It cannot even transcend them. It emerges from the
fact of interconnection as a
general principal of life. It must take a long view of human
life and nature as they form a
mesh or pattern going beyond historical time and beyond
the conceptual bounds of other
humane disciplines. Or man is in the world & his ecology
is the nature of that 'inness'"
according to ecologist, Paul Shepard, 1969.
imagery revolution,
[1850 - 1998] Since the purpose of much advertising is to deceive
the motive of much entertainment, broadcasting, and even
news coverage, or commentary
is to dull peoples' brains and sell them a perspective
of the sponsors, producers, writers, or
anchor persons. The institutions that partake in this are:
mass media, newspapers &
magazines, photography, movies, radio, television, computers,
internet, & political
imagination requires
that the images we see on film, video-tape, or in print be "honest"
portrayals since images and symbols have the capacity to
distract us from the reality of the
world. For example since most of the country's population
is urban, media advertising
emphasizes the rural and wild setting over urban scenes. Are
these images honest
portrayals of our experience? How is imagination
manipulated?
misplaced sentiment:
is the inability to distinguish true feelings from less sincere
nostalgic yearnings for allegedly simpler times in the past.
Sentiments that are seriously
inappropriate include childish fantasies & wish fulfillment instead of realistic feelings about
our accomplishments and failures. The expression of
feelings so as to hide from view the
deeper complexities of human emotions. See also: fictions
(above).
oikumene, oikoumen, In the
ancient Greek tradition oikoumene is the concept of
"the
inhabited world," although it had six other meanings.
"A peopled place known to
sustain life." Peoples in their surroundings or a
habitation; landscape and architecture of
places.
politics of tools,
by failing to critically analyze the influence of our
media (tools) on
policies, laws, trials, and livelihoods we are prone to
manipulation because deception is so
widespread. Any technology exerts an influence on politics
either overtly in the form of
debates over censorship, abortion, and finance costs or
covertly due to the shaping of our
work, homes and past-times by gadgets, machines and
equipment.
reification means
treating anything fictional or abstract as though it were actually existing
or real. Treating an abstraction or
some ideal as substantially real. The mass production of
images feeds the reification of misplaced sentiment because
we do not critically examine the
content of these symbols. Examples of this include:
"the masses," "baby boomers," "the
economy," "generation X".
science is our word
for knowledge and is derived from the Indo-European word to cut or
divide "skire". [SKEI {from scire: to cut} [GREEK] to separate (/) divide or
split.] The
word has a general and specific meaning that depends on
the context in which the word is
used. Science is the knowledge we amass about the physical
universe's predictable
periodicity. Science is really a method, or way of knowing about
our existence.
sybaritic, means -- wantonly indulgent, luxurious display of behavior to avoid work, a
pleasure seeker. Eschewing good taste & ignoring
moderation.
An excessive reliance on
pleasure to mold behavior. An extremely epicurean
perspective on
life. Thomas Hobbes (17th Century) argued we were motivated by the desire for pleasure
and the avoidance of pain.
synergy, synergetic, synergistic, two or more forces acting
in tandem have an
impact that is greater than the mere sum of the combined
effects. This idea leads to the
notion of the multiplier effect to measure the relative
strength of synergistic influences of
technology on the economy, politics, and organizations of
societies. Two harmless
depressants when taken independently have a mortal synergy:
Alcohol + Barbiturates =
death.
technological
autism a form of technical virtuosity
in media and transportation has
encouraged us to become out of touch with the actual processes
that living things depend
on for their survival and emotional security. This
self-indulgent behavior is
somnambulistic, and encourages us to be contented consumers of
superficial messages
designed to deaden our feelings. An extreme withdrawal from
life based on emotional
detachment.
technology, is the systematic application of knowledge to
expressive, manufacturing, mechanical, industrial, or chemical arts to solve problems.
The applied use of factual
knowledge to enhance and accumulate efficient changes in the human use of
tools, devices, instruments, utensils, or artifacts
in the creation of material culture while assuring survival.
Technology refers to the related series of
steps, procedures, tools, and artifacts to make a
product that has a market or meets some demand from the population.
Inventions and their related technical and
organizational impacts tend to speed up, influence, & accelerate the uses
of power over time dramatically changing
people, wealth, nature, and ideas.
technical changes
refers to five related influences of the capacity of technology change
our milieu. This is because technology:
1), alters or raises the carrying capacity of a place to
house a greater density of population.
2), compensates for human frailty.
3), redefines reality
and the boundaries of our knowledge.
4), and technical
change accounts for the differences in people's material culture.
5), conditions us to behave differently
in the absence or presence of machines or mechanical appliances.
trivialize, the skillful ability to
divert attention from serious or weighty issues and focus
mass attention on so many inconsequential details that
most observers lose track of the heart
of an issue. The irreverent use or deliberate
manipulation of meaningful ideas, beliefs,
symbols, or customs in such a way as to diminish the
importance of, or actually lose, the
comprehensive narrative that gives coherence to a culture
undergoing rapid social change.